London: The Biography is the pinnacle of Peter Ackroyd’s brilliant obsession with the eponymous city. In this unusual and engaging work, Ackroyd brings the reader through time into the city whose institutions and idiosyncrasies have permeated much of his works of fiction and nonfiction.
Peter Ackroyd sees London as a living, breathing organism, with its own laws of growth and change. Reveling in the city’s riches as well as its raucousness, the author traces thematically its growth from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Anecdotal, insightful, and wonderfully entertaining, London is animated by Ackroyd’s concern for the close relationship between the present and the past, as well as by what he describes as the peculiar “echoic” quality of London, whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens.
London confirms Ackroyd’s status as what one critic has called “our age’s greatest London imagination.”
About the Author
Peter Ackroyd is a best-selling writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His most recent books include the biographies Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More, and the novels The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, Milton in America, and The Plato Papers. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award (jointly), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Guardian fiction prize. He lives in London.
Industry Reviews
“Magnificent... Succeeds in animating on the page the life of one of the oldest and greatest cities in the world.” - The New York Times Book Review
“Ackroyd is the most effortless guide... This is much more than history: it is a tapestry of inspiration and love.” - The Observer
“An erudite labour of love, a fan-letter to a fabulous city... As exuberant, energetic and alarming as the city itself.” - Independent on Sunday
“A fat and filling feast: pretty much everything of interest about the capital is crammed into the eight-hundred pages.” - The Times
“If London had the ability to choose its biographer it undoubtedly would tap Peter Ackroyd.” - Vanity Fair
“A wonderful book, a treasure of information and anecdote about one of the world’s great cities, a book to be taken up again and again for the pleasures that lie within.” - Chicago Tribune
“A book to match its subject... one gratefully rediscovers that urban unreality, the city of romance and mystery as well as the one of shops, pubs, and thoroughfares.” - The Washington Post
“Fizzles with vitality and originality.” - Sunday Times
“Marvellous – the book about London.” - Daily Mail
“Peter Ackroyd was born to write the biography of London... A brilliant book.” - Sunday Telegraph
"It would be no exaggeration to say that Peter Ackroyd's 'biography' of our capital is the book about London. It contains a lifetime of reading and research-but this huge book is light and airy and playful-[He] leads us on a journey both historical and geographical, but also imaginative. Every street, alley and courtyard has a story, and Ackroyd brings it to life for us - marvellous." - A. N. Wilson, Daily Mail
"Nothing can quite match the huge strange echo chamber of life-stories, folktales, and urban myths conjured up in Peter Ackroyd's epic vision of his native city. Sparkling, witty scholarship is constantly transformed into smoky mystical street-history, with dark hypnotic meditations on fog, fire, sewage, suicide and civic resurrection." - Richard Holmes, Daily Telegraph
"Ackroyd is the most effortless guide. You wander by his side through the streets of the old city, savouring its bustle, colours and its smells, the stink of living. This is much more than history; it is a tapestry of inspiration and love. You will not find a better, more visionary book about a place we take for granted." - Observer
"It's this decade's finest work of non-fiction." - Jude Rogers, The Word
"[London] may be several years old but it remains one of the leading narratives as he cleverly weaves through centuries of history to reveal to us the hundreds of different cities within a city." - Fiona Hamilton, The Times
